Who Owns the Future? Read Free Page A

by remote control.
    It is typical of human nature to ignore hypocrisy. The greater a hypocrisy, the more invisible it typically becomes, but we technical folk are inclined to seek an airtight whole of ideas. Here is one such synthesis—of cryptography for techies and massive spying on others—which I continue to hear fairly often: Privacy for ordinary people can be forfeited in the near term because it will become moot anyway.
    Surveillance by the technical few on the less technical many can be tolerated for now because of hopes for an endgame in which everything will become transparent to everyone. Network entrepreneurs and cyber-activists alike seem to imagine that today’s elite network servers in positions of information supremacy will eventually become eternally benign, or just dissolve.
    In the telling of digital utopias, when computing gets ultragood and ultracheap we won’t have to worry about the reach of elite network players descended from today’s derivatives funds, or Silicon Valley companies like Google or Facebook. In a future world of abundance, everyone will be motivated to be open and generous.
    Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians always seem to take socialist turns. The joys of life will be too cheap to meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient.
    This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine, there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the meantime, those truebelievers encrypt their servers even as they seek to gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage it.
    It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.
The Problem Is Not the Technology, but the Way We Think About the Technology
    I will argue that up until about the turn of this century we didn’t need to worry about technological advancement devaluing people, because new technologies always created new kinds of jobs even as old ones were destroyed. But the dominant principle of the new economy, the information economy, has lately been to conceal the value of information, of all things.
    We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.
    Whether these elite new presences are consumer-facing services like Google, or more hidden operations like high-frequency-trading firms, is mostly a matter of semantics. In either case, the biggest and best-connected computers provide the settings in which information turns into money. Meanwhile, trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes that the emerging information economy is benefiting the majority of those who provide the information that drives it.
    If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, “raw” information, or information that hasn’t yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn’t valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.
    Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in